Millions of Americans are still on AOL, as Apollo mulls $1.5 billion sale

When industries hit inflection points, pioneers’ fates diverge. Some rocket into behemoths, others hold up without ever reaching those heights, and some capitulate under the change — like the film icon Kodak, the onetime retail titan Sears, or AOL, the internet OG and now obsolete web portal that once defined what it meant to be “online.”

But AOL is not as dead as you might think it is.

According to The Wall Street Journal, private equity giant Apollo is weighing a sale of AOL, after getting “inbound interest” from potential buyers, in a deal that could value it at ~$1.5 billion. That would mark the latest stop in AOL’s long, bumpy ride through a string of owners: Apollo picked it up (alongside Yahoo) from Verizon for $5 billion in 2021, after Verizon itself had bought AOL for $4.4 billion in 2015 — just a fraction of its peak valuation.

Despite the reversal of fortune over the years, AOL’s traffic is still very real.

From June to August, aol.com averaged 239 million monthly visits, per data from Similarweb. That’s more than retailers like Etsy, Target, and Home Depot; tech and streaming platforms like Microsoft, Apple, Hulu, and Spotify; and even big media brands like the New York Post and BBC.

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